One Size Does Not Fit All: Creating An SEO Strategy For Your Multi-Location Business

Any business owner that has multiple brick-and-mortar locations understands the obstacles they must overcome when it comes to their SEO efforts. With local, and many times, national audiences in mind, it can get tricky to identify a sole SEO strategy that works for each location. Ignoring one or the other can leave leads and sales for your business in no man’s land – which is why I am here to help you create a 3-Step multi-location SEO strategy so you can start driving more quality visitors to your website.

1. Local Landing Page Optimization

Creating local landing pages for each of your stores is critical to ensure you’re creating SEO value for each location. These landing pages should include specific information about the location, such as contact information (email address and phone number), street address, hours of operation, directions, etc.

Yet, this is just the bare minimum. At Stream, we suggest adding much more substantial strategy for these landing pages in order to drive the high-quality, local traffic to your website.

I am going to use a local pizza shop as an example. This pizza shop has two locations in Hopewell, NJ and two in Philadelphia, PA. Here is a screenshot from one of their location specific landing pages for a Philadelphia store.

As you can see, they’ve covered the basics page elements of a local landing page, but there is still untapped opportunity to build upon this Philadelphia landing page and its overall SEO value.

Including real images of the street view of the store, images of the interior of the store, and images of food or service (if applicable) offered by your business, will help improve the ranking ability and user experience of the landing page.

To break it down, here is a 5-point checklist to ensure your location specific landing page is effectively built to drive quality website traffic:

1. Geo-Targeted URL

2. Unique content, relevant to the location served

3. Optimized Metadata and H1 tags that contain the keyword you are targeting

4. Real images of the business locations street view, staff or interior shots of the business, with location specific alt tags

5. Hours, address & phone number, brief information about the location. A bonus: embed a Google map to help customers find you and enhance their overall experience on the landing page.

2. Local Business Directories

In addition to the 5-points mentioned above, you’ll want to make sure each store location has specific Yelp, Google+ and local citation listings.

A great tool to find local citations that are not optimized, not claimed or not yet built, is Moz Local (previously GetListed). This tool grades your current performance in local citations and highlights any citation issues that need to be fixed.

It is best practice to make sure all local citations for your businesses locations list the same business name, phone number, address and URL.

For Google+ and Local, it is best practice that each location has its own page, with the listed URL pointing to their location specific landing page.

3. Local Sponsorships/Partnerships

At Stream, one of the first things I ask my clients is what associations they have within their community. Many have them, but do not see the opportunity in recognizing these relationships within the digital realm. Since you are the business owner, getting this list should be effortless.

Once you get your list or associations together (which will hopefully be specific to the individual locations of your business), ask your contact to help you promote any upcoming events held by the association by linking to, and sharing socially, a page created on your site that highlights the association and the details about the event.

Not only will this help the success of the event, but it also it earns you a natural local backlink to your website, helping Google correlate your business with the locations of its brick-and-mortar stores.

Now that you have a 3-step multi-location SEO strategy, you can start to gain grounds in the local search engines and attract more relevant, local traffic to each of your stores.

For more on SEO and how to get found by your local audience, download this eBook, How Stream Does SEO .

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